Active Wildfires Map — Live US Wildfire & Fire Perimeter Tracker
An interactive, full-screen map of active wildfires across the United States. Fire perimeters are drawn straight from the federal WFIGS / NIFC interagency feed and color-coded by size and containment, so you can see at a glance where the largest and least-contained fires are burning right now. Explore the live map above, then scroll for details on the data and how to read it.
What this wildfire map shows
This is a current wildfires map: each shaded polygon is the mapped perimeter of an active incident, plus a labeled center point so smaller fires stay visible when you zoom out. Perimeters are shaded by acreage — green for fires under 100 acres, yellow for 100 to 999 acres, and red for 1,000 acres and larger — with a matching outline so overlapping fires stay legible. Both true wildfires and prescribed (RX) burns are available, and prescribed burns are drawn more faintly so they are easy to tell apart. The whole layer sits on top of fast LatLng vector basemap tiles, so panning across the country stays smooth even with hundreds of complex boundaries in view.
Where the WFIGS / NIFC data comes from
Perimeters and incident attributes come from the Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services (WFIGS) current interagency fire perimeters service, published by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). This is the authoritative, publicly available federal source that US wildland fire agencies use to share operational fire data. The worker pulls the public GeoJSON feed, caches it briefly, and refreshes it on a schedule. Because it is a public GIS layer, not every incident has a digitized perimeter, and real-world conditions can move faster than the data updates — so this map is built for discovery, situational context, and research, not for evacuation or emergency routing.
How to read fire size and containment
Two numbers tell most of the story on any active fire. Size is measured in acres — the total burned area inside the perimeter — and drives the color of each fire, so the biggest incidents jump out in red. Containment is the percentage of a fire's edge that crews have secured with control lines; a large fire at 5% contained is a very different situation from a large fire at 90%. Click any perimeter or list row to open a detail card with acreage, containment percentage, discovery and last-updated times, general cause, and assigned personnel, so you can quickly judge how serious and how fresh an incident is.
Using the filters, search, and side list
- Filter by size — hide the noise and show only fires above 10, 100, or 1,000 acres.
- Filter by type — switch between wildfires, prescribed burns, or both.
- Search a location — jump to any city or
lat,lng to see the fires burning near it.
- Browse the side list — every fire in the current view is listed with its size and containment; filter it by name, state, or county and click to fly to and inspect that perimeter.
- Pan and zoom — the map reloads perimeters for whatever region you move into.
Why a live wildfire map is useful
A current, nationwide view of wildfire perimeters helps a wide range of people make faster, better-informed decisions. Residents and travelers can see whether large or poorly contained fires are near a route or destination; outdoor, insurance, climate, and local-news teams can add up-to-date context to their coverage; and analysts can watch how fire size and containment evolve over a season. Because the perimeters are real geospatial data rather than a static image, the same layer can power state and regional pages — current California wildfires, Oregon fire perimeters, "wildfires near me" — as well as embeddable maps.
Built on the LatLng maps platform
This is a live demo of the LatLng mapping stack: an external GeoJSON dataset rendered as an interactive overlay on LatLng basemap vector tiles, with geocoding for the location search. You can build the same kind of live, data-driven map — points, boundaries, or your own uploaded datasets served as vector tiles via the Datasets API — on a generous free tier.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the wildfire data come from?
Perimeters and incident details come from the WFIGS current interagency fire perimeters service, published by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) — the authoritative federal source for active US wildfire perimeters.
How often is the map updated?
The worker refreshes the WFIGS feed roughly every few minutes and caches it. Not every incident has a mapped perimeter, and real conditions can change faster than public GIS layers update, so treat it as situational context, not emergency guidance.
What do the fire colors mean?
Perimeters are colored by size in acres: green for fires under 100 acres, yellow for 100 to 999 acres, and red for 1,000 acres or larger. Selecting a fire also shows its containment percentage.
More live map demos